Reliquary

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THE WEST SIDE railyard lay in a wide depression on the westernmost reaches of Manhattan, out of sight and practically invisible to the millions of New Yorkers who lived and worked nearby, its seventy-four acres the largest piece of undeveloped land on the island outside Central Park. Once a bustling hub of turn-of-the-century commerce, the railyard now lay fallow: rusted tracks sunken among burdock and ailanthus trees, ancient sidings rotting and forgotten, abandoned warehouses sagging and covered with graffiti.

For twenty years the piece of ground had been the subject of development plans, lawsuits, political manipulations, and bankruptcies. The tenants of the warehouses had gradually abandoned their leases and left, to be replaced by vandals, arsonists, and the homeless. In one corner of the railyard lay a small, bedraggled shantytown of plywood, cardboard, and tin. Alongside were a few pathetic kitchen gardens of straggly peas and squash run riot.

Margo stood amidst a plot of fire-scorched piles of rubble, sandwiched between two abandoned railyard buildings. The warehouse occupying the plot had burned four months earlier, and it had burned hotly and thoroughly. The structure had been reduced to a blackened I-beam framework and some low cinder-block stem walls. Beneath her feet, the cement pad was hip deep in rubble and burned shingles. The remains of several long metal tables stood in one corner of the lot, covered with smashed equipment and melted glass. She looked around, peering through the late afternoon shadows that knitted themselves across the sunken ground. There were several hulks that had once been large machines, housed in metal cabinets; the cabinets had melted and the inner workings lay exposed, masses of twisted wire and ruined circuit boards. The acrid stench of burned plastic and tar clung stubbornly to everything.

D’Agosta appeared at her side. “Whaddaya think?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Are you sure this was Greg’s last known address?”

“Confirmed it with the moving company. The warehouse burned about the time of his death, so it’s doubtful he moved anywhere else. But he used an alias with Con Ed and New York Telephone, so we can’t be certain.”

“An alias?” Margo continued to look around. “I wonder if he died before or after this place burned.”

“Not as much as I wonder,” D’Agosta replied.

“It looks like this was some kind of laboratory.”

D’Agosta nodded. “Even I could have guessed that. This guy Kawakita was a scientist. Just like you.”

“Not quite. Greg was more involved with genetics and evolutionary biology. My specialty is anthropological pharmacology.”

“Whatever.” D’Agosta hiked up his pants. “Question is, what kind of lab is it?”

“Hard to say. I’d need to learn more about those machines in the corner. And I’d have to map out the melted glass on these tables, try to re-create what the setups might have been.”

D’Agosta looked at her. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“You wanna take it on?”

Margo returned the Lieutenant’s gaze. “Why me? You must have specialists in the department that—”

“They’re not interested,” D’Agosta interrupted. “It ranks right below jaywalking on their list of priorities.”

Margo frowned in surprise.

“The powers that be don’t give a damn about Kawakita or what he was doing before he was killed. They think he was just a random victim. Just like they think Brambell was a random victim.”

“But you don’t? You think he was involved in these murders somehow?”

D’Agosta pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his brow. “Hell, I don’t know. I just feel this guy Kawakita was up to something, and I’d like to know what it was. You knew him, right?”

“Yes,” Margo said.

“I only met him once, when Frock had that good-bye party for Pendergast. What was he like?”

Margo thought a moment. “He was brilliant. An excellent scientist.”

“What about his personality?”

“He wasn’t the nicest person in the Museum,” Margo said carefully. “He was—well, a little ruthless, I guess you could say. I felt he was the kind of person who would perhaps step over the line to advance his career. He didn’t associate much with the rest of us, and didn’t seem to trust anybody who might…” She stopped.

“Yeah?”

“Is this necessary? I hate to talk about someone who isn’t around to defend himself.”

“That’s usually the best time. Was he the kind of guy to get involved in any criminal activity?”

“Absolutely not. I didn’t always agree with his ethics—he was one of those scientists who held science above human values—but he was no criminal.” She hesitated. “He tried to reach me awhile back. Maybe a month or so before he died.”

D’Agosta looked at her curiously. “Any idea why? It doesn’t seem like you two were exactly friends.”

“Not close friends. But we were colleagues. If he was in some kind of trouble—” A shadow crossed her face. “Maybe I could have done something about it. Instead of just ignoring the call.”

“Guess you’ll never know. But anyway, if you’d take the time to poke around, try to get some ideas of what he was doing here, I’d appreciate it.”

Margo hesitated, and D’Agosta gave her a closer look. “Who knows?” he said in a quieter tone. “Maybe it’ll help lay some of those inner demons to rest.”

Nice choice of words, Margo thought. Still, she knew he meant well. Lieutenant D’Agosta, pop psychologist. Next thing you know, he’ll be telling me that looking over this site will help give me closure.

She glanced over the ruined site for a long minute. “Okay, Lieutenant,” she said at last.

“Want me to get a photographer down here, take some pictures?”

“Maybe later. For now, I’d rather just make a few sketches.”

“Sure thing.” D’Agosta seemed restless.

“You go on,” Margo said. “You don’t need to hang around.”

“No way,” D’Agosta said. “Not after Brambell.”

“Lieutenant—”

“I’ve got to collect some of the ashes anyway, to test for trace accelerants. I’ll stay out of your way.” He stood truculently, unmoving.

Margo sighed, pulled a sketchbook out of her carryall, and once again turned her attention to the ruined lab. It was a dreary place, surrounding her in silent accusation. You could have done something. Greg tried to reach you. Perhaps it didn’t have to end like this.

She shook her head, scattering the guilty thoughts. They wouldn’t be of any help. Besides, if any place held the clues to explain what happened to Greg, this place would. And maybe the only way to get out of this nightmare was for her just to lower her head and go straight through. Anyway, it got her out of the Forensic Anthropology lab, which had started to look like a charnel house. The Bitterman corpse had arrived from NYME Wednesday afternoon, bringing a fresh set of questions along with it. The scoring on the neck bones of the still-fleshed corpse pointed to decapitation by some kind of rough, primitive knife. The killer—or killers—had been rushed in their grisly task.

She quickly mapped out the rough outlines of the lab, sketching in the dimensions of the walls, the location of the tables, and the placement of the slaglike heaps of ruined equipment. Every laboratory had a flow to it, depending on what kind of work was being done. While the equipment might indicate the general kind of research, the flow itself would give clues to the specific application.

The rough outlines completed, Margo moved to the tables themselves. Being metal, they had withstood the heat of the fire relatively well. She sketched out a rectangle to indicate each tabletop, then began noting the melted beakers, titration tubes, volumetric flasks, and other items still unidentifiable. It was a complex, multilayered setup: clearly, some kind of high-level biochemistry had been going on. But what?

She paused for a moment, breathing in the mingled scents of burnt electrical insulation and the saline breeze off the Hudson. Then she turned her attention to the melted machinery. It was expensive stuff, judging from the brushed stainless-steel cabinetry and the remains of flat panel and vacuum fluorescent displays.

Margo tackled the largest machine first. Its metal casing had slumped in the heat, the innards detached. She gave it a light kick, shrinking back as it fell with a loud crash. She suddenly felt aware of how alone they were. Beyond the railyards and across the river, the sun hung low over the New Jersey Palisades. She could hear the cry of seagulls as they wheeled over the rotting stumps of old piers rising from the Hudson’s shore. Beyond the railyards, a cheerful summer afternoon was ending. Yet here, in this sunken, abandoned place, no cheer came. She glanced at D’Agosta, who had collected his samples and was standing in the late sun, arms crossed, staring out at the Hudson. Now she was glad he’d insisted on staying.

She bent over the machine, smiling inwardly at her nervousness. Turning over the pieces of scorched and discolored metal, she eventually found the faceplate she was searching for. Rubbing it free of soot, she made out the words WESTERLY GENETICS EQUIPMENT, along with a WGE logo. Beneath, on the bezel, was a stamped serial number and the words WGE INTEGRATED DNA ANALYZER-SEQUENCER. She jotted the information down on her sketchpad.

In a far corner was heaped a small pile of shattered, melted machinery that looked different from the rest. Margo examined it, carefully turning over each piece and laying it out, trying to figure out what it was. It seemed to be a rather complex organic chem synthesis setup, complete with fractionation and distillation apparatus, diffusion gradients, and low-voltage electrical nodes. Toward the bottom, where things were less damaged by the heat, she found the broken pieces of several Erlenmeyer flasks. Judging by the words on their frosted labels, most were normal lab chemicals. One fragmentary label, however, she did not immediately recognize: ACTIVATED 7-DEHYDROCHOLE…

She turned the piece over. Damn, the chemical name had a familiar ring to it. At last, she dropped the piece into her carryall. No doubt it would be listed in the organic chem encyclopedia back at the lab.

Beside the machine were the remains of a thin notebook, burned through except for a few carbonized pages. As she picked it up curiously, it began to crumble in her hands. Carefully, she picked up the charred pieces, slid them carefully into a Ziploc bag, and stowed it in her carryall.

Within fifteen minutes, she had managed to identify enough of the other machines to be certain of one thing: this had once been a world-class genetics laboratory. Margo worked with similar machines on a daily basis, and she knew enough to estimate the cost of this ruined lab at over half a million dollars.

She stepped back. Where had Kawakita gotten the money to fund this kind of lab? And what the hell could he have been up to?

As she moved across the cement pad, making notations in her sketchbook, something odd caught her eye. Among the piles of rubble and melted glass, she made out what looked like five large puddles of mud, baked to a cementlike consistency by the fire. Around them were sprinkles of gravel.

Curious, she bent over to examine the rubble more closely. There was a small metal object, about the size of her fist, embedded in the nearest puddle. Pulling a penknife from her carryall, she pried out the object and scraped off the crust that clung to it like cement. Beneath the mud she could make out MINNE ARIUM SUPPL. Turning the object over and over in her hands, she realized what it was: an aquarium pump.

She stood up, looking down at the five similar heaps of rubble lined up beneath the remaining skeleton of a wall. The gravel, the broken glass… these must have been aquaria. Huge, too, judging by the size of the puddles. But aquaria filled with mud? It didn’t make sense.

Kneeling, she took her penknife and worked it into the closest dried mass. It came away in pieces, like concrete. Picking up one of the larger pieces and turning it over, Margo was surprised to see what looked like the roots and partial stem of a plant, preserved from burning by the protective mud coating. Cursing the clumsiness of the penknife, she carefully worked the plant loose from the mud and held it up to the fading light.

Suddenly, she dropped the plant and jerked her hand back, as if burned. After a moment, she picked it up again and examined it more closely, her heart suddenly racing. It’s not possible, she thought.

She knew this plant—knew it well. The tough, fibrous stem, the bizarrely knotted roots, brought back searing memories: sitting in the deserted Genetics lab at the Museum, face glued to the eyepiece of a microscope, mere hours before the disastrous opening of the Superstition exhibition. It was the rare Amazonian plant that the Mbwun creature had craved so desperately. The same plant Whittlesey had inadvertently used as packing material in the fateful crate of relics sent to the Museum from the Upper Xingu almost a decade before. The plant was now supposed to be extinct: its original habitat had been wiped out, and all remaining vestiges of it at the Museum had been destroyed by the authorities after the Mbwun creature—the Museum Beast—was finally killed.

Margo stood up again, brushing soot from her knees. Greg Kawakita had somehow gotten his hands on this plant and had been growing it in these massive aquaria.

But why?

A sudden, horrible thought struck her. As quickly as it had come, she brushed it aside. Surely, there was no second Mbwun creature that Greg had been feeding.

Or was there?

“Lieutenant?” she asked. “Do you know what this is?”

He came over. “Not a clue,” he replied.

“Liliceae mbwunensis. The Mbwun plant.”

“You’re shitting me, right?”

Margo shook her head slowly. “I wish I were.”

They stood, unmoving, as the sun sank below the Palisades, gilding the distant buildings across the river in a halo of oblique light. She looked again at the plant in her hand, preparing to place it in her carryall, and noticed something that she had missed before.

At the end of the root base, she could make out a small graft scar along the xylem, a long double-V in the dim light. A graft scar like that, she knew, meant one of only two things. A common hybrid experiment.

Or a very sophisticated genetic engineering experiment.